Lori was able to finish the stove and the roof over it by late afternoon. The lip of the roof was just under the roof of the dining hall, and with a raised lip on the outside curve of the roof, any rainwater shouldn't fall on the food as it was taken out. That night, the demesne was called out to the dining hall and told to bring bowls and utensils. The meal was stew, because that was simple and easy to make enough for over fifty people. There was some meat that had been packed in snow to preserve it, some vigas grains that were boiled in the broth, a few dried fruits and wild vegetables.

There was some grumbling as people had to line up to fill their bowls, but between the hot food, the lightwisps Lori had anchored—with difficulty, since she had to reach up with her staff while standing on a table—to illuminate the dining hall, and the little fires they'd put down around the perimeter of the dining hall that she'd bound and imbued the firewisps of to throw out increased heat, people seemed willing to stay and eat there rather than trying to take the food back to their homes.

"It's the light and warmth," Rian commented as he finished reporting what had transpired. "It's probably pretty dark in their homes, since they can't really build up their fires too high. The dining hall will look far more welcoming and inviting, even if it will be a bit drafty without walls. And having Shana there helping serve the food seemed to make an impression, though I hesitate to speculate exactly what. At the very least, it certainly made people show up to eat there. Now they just have to make it a habit."

Lori nodded. "And you'll handle tomorrow's part?" She still thought it would have been easier to send militia to go into people's houses while they were eating and seize any stored food, but according to Rian, who had heard from… Lori sighed and checked her rock, ignoring her lord's amused look… Yllian that not everyone had turned in the supplies as they were supposed to, with people claiming they'd already cooked it all in a big breakfast. Which was just another reason why her new idiots couldn't be trusted with food.

Rian said they couldn't just send their people to check the houses for food while everyone was eating, because that would result in broken trust or something. Didn't the fact people were stealing food from the stores mean that trust was already broken? Hence this plan that Lori though was needlessly overcomplicated. It wasn't that Lori couldn't understand the reasoning behind it—it was very simple reasoning, as befitting something that needed to be easily understood by her new idiots—it just seemed needlessly pretentious. The systemic failings of River Fork's lack of proper discipline were well known and needed to be fixed, and this would fix it. It needed to be done, had needed to be done for some time, so why would they need an 'excuse' to implement it?

But Rian claimed doing it this way would act to curtail potential violence, while also implementing discipline. Yllian had reluctantly agreed, as had Shanalorre.

"Yes, the food stores will be audited, and when it inevitably comes up short, we'll have an excuse to inspect everyone's houses for food they technically shouldn't have," Rian said. He sighed. "Hopefully this doesn't get too ugly. At this point I suspect everyone has a little bit in their house to try and stave off the inevitable, so we'll only be punishing people with egregiously big caches of food. The rest will be allowed their little emergency supply—it's a good idea anyway, in case something happens that keeps people trapped inside like a storm or something—while being informed they shouldn't get more."

"Telling them so directly would be far more efficient," Lori said, "and taking the food from them equally efficient."

Rian waved his hands sideways in a strange sweeping gesture that managed to be ambivalent instead of dismissive. "Some people don't learn by being told. A more practical, tactile approach is sometimes necessary. Besides, one should never give an order one knows will be disobeyed, unless one actually wants it disobeyed. Doing so only weakens your authority. And while you're the technically the supreme authority here—"

"I am the supreme authority here." Her tone was flat, final and unamused.

"While you are the supreme authority here," Rian amended smoothly, "that authority isn't being backed up by the full destructive power and monopoly on force of a Dungeon Binder as it usually would. In practical terms, as an authoritarian you're facing the same limitations as a lord or lady who just happens to be a Whisperer: your subjects outnumber you in practical terms, you have limited militia that you can't really ask to do anything extreme because these people are their friends and neighbors—annoying as some of them might be for being troublemakers—and if you push them too far, they know where you sleep and everyone has to sleep eventually."

A shudder vibrated up Lori's spine at the way Rian emphasized that last item. She remembered the days when she'd slept alone in her room, separated from everyone else in the demesne by cracks just barely wide enough to provide her with air. Colors, had that only been… just a little under a year, at this point. Why had she stopped?

"Which is why I'll be sleeping in front of your door, just in case," he continued. "So please don't block out sound through the door again, because my dying screams might be the only warning you get. In which case, take that as my tacit admission that all my plans are wrong about everything and we should have used direct violence at the start. Granted, I don't think it'll come to that, since from what I've seen everyone's only self-centered and slightly uncaring of the people around them instead of actively malicious and hostile, but everyone thinks that until they're proven wrong."

Lori twitched. "You could have led with that," she said.

"I know, but keeping it last is well-respected oratorical tradition," he said cheerfully.

She glared at him, even as she grudgingly acknowledged his point. Somehow, that sort of expository structure always sounded more fun in the theater, or in a novel. In real life, it was just annoying.

––––––––––––––––––

The next few days were extremely irritating for Lori, though as the alternative was Rian's hypothetical scenario of someone trying to kill her in her sleep, she supposed it could be far worse. She had to spend that time outside her demesne. After the first two nights sleeping in her room in the Coldhold, she began setting a binding of airwisps to air it while she was gone since it was becoming stuffy. Doing so was a bit difficult because there was only one entrance, but she was able to make the airwisps flow through a twisting loop such that air was pulled in from the top of the door and pushed out from the bottom.

During those days, she built. An addition was added to the dining hall's cooking facilities in the form of a bread oven that would let them bake discs and coils of bread. While bread was quick to make, having a single facility cooking it for over fifty people was time consuming, and so it needed to be fairly sizable, as well as able to potentially roast meat and other foodstuffs in future.

After that, she worked on the rest of the infrastructure that in her opinion the demesne desperately needed. Even before a dragon shelter, the place needed secure food storage. She'd finally seen what River's Fork used for food storage, and it had been a literal root cellar. That is, an underground chamber that had been created by Deadspeaking, the wooden walls constructed from Deadspoken living roots that had been fused into solid panels, then lined with straw from the multiple harvests of vigas from the year before to act as insulation before wall panels of none-living, Deadspoken wood were put in place to complete the structure, as well as pillars to hold up the ceiling.

The structure was actually fairly spacious, and a fool might have thought it would have sufficed as a dragon shelter if they ignored the fact less than a third of a pace of dirt covered the structure; that the door to the food storage was a light, almost hollow-feeling door that hung on its frame by leather hinges fused to both by more Deadspeaking; that the door was loose in its frame as the leather had already taken a beating and as a result didn't lock properly; or the fact the door had claw marks from dragonborn abominations, one of which had broken through the door and left a hole that still hadn't been patched up. Granted, it was too small for bugs to get into, but still!

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Lori considered it almost pure chance that the structure had been in an area high enough that flooding hadn't reached it, given that it seemed to have been made with a fanciful aesthetic rather than pragmatic utility in mind. It would certainly have fit what other examples of Shanalorre's late predecessor's work she'd seen. While the storage room was mostly still functional, they were using it to store their meat supplies on ice, and the water had already started degrading the wood, and would inevitably lead to fungus and rot, possibly infecting any further food stored there. Thus she needed to build properly sturdy food storage, one that could be used to store food more securely, especially through a dragon. The fact the demesne hadn't lost all their food to abominations, or simply exposure and damage, was quite frankly absurd in her eyes, and not an absurdity that would probably happen again.

And that was just the start of the infrastructure she needed to build. In addition to the food storage that would hopefully keep out thieves in future, she'd also need to build supply storage for things like wood, firewood, leather, and other raw materials; a dragon shelter, which for the sake of convenience and survival should be connected to the food and supply storage; a water storage cistern; and houses more secure and longer-lasting than the ones the demesne was currently inhabiting.

That last, she knew, would by necessity would have to be temporary. While she was still working on Deadspeaking, it didn't take one to see that the dome was clearly suffering from its unnatural construction and lack of maintenance by a proper Deadspeaker. In addition to the tree whose trunk had shattered and which she'd secured with stone in one of her earlier arrangements with Shanalorre—had that been more than half a year ago already?—some of the other trees that had been integrated and interwoven into the dome seemed to be dead, or at least dying. Rian had shared his suspicion that some of the trees comprising the dome were parasitizing others, or at least drawing on more than their fair share of nutrients, behavior which would probably have been curtailed by a Deadspeaker who was sufficiently familiar with botany and plant behavior.

It was, in Lori's opinion, something of an indictment of the demesne's founder. While her demesne utilized a lot of Wisps that she had to constantly keep imbued, none of it was structural or, strictly speaking, necessary. It was part of why she built using pillar and arch structures, so that none of her buildings, and none of her Dungeon's levels, needed earthwisps to reinforce their structure. The lights, the heat, the running water? Convenient, of course, but should all the imbuments run out one day, nothing in her demesne would become unusable. Cisterns and the water reservoir would still hold water, they'd just need to manually pour and lift it out with buckets. People would need fire for light and heat, but structures would still be solid. Her doors would stay in place, because they had been mounted with carpentry, even if she'd used earthwisps to set them into stone.

River's Fork, however… everything in it needed active maintenance by a Deadspeaker, Dungeon Binder or not. They used to have elevated houses on stilts, until those fell down from the dragons. While the buildings were solid wood, it was untreated solid wood, with no charring applied or oil brushed on to inhibit rot and decay. The central tree had homes built into it, but during nights, Lori saw very few of those homes with burning lights to indicate occupancy. She identified only four on the entire tree, and the two near the top she was fairly sure was Shanalorre and her remaining in-laws. For that matter, few of the houses at ground level had lights either. Was that from a lack of occupation or a lack of light?

While she was, of course, not going to die any time in the following century, because she would take command of her body's aging with Deadspeaking—once she figured out how to do it—if she happened to forget to maintain anything in her demesne, it would continue for function for as long as the stone stands, and given she used strong, solid stone as building material, that would likely be a long time.

It was almost… sad, really. All this construction, now going to waste because it hadn't been designed to be maintained by anyone but the one who had built it. No wonder Shanalorre had failed. She had been trying to lead people who lived in a place slowly dying around them. Of course everything had degraded. People had literally seen the signs of it on the walls.

Well, Lori was here now.

After the cooking facilities, the food storage was next. She was building it in the copper mine, simply softening and excavating the stone from the walls near the entrance to clear open a large space. The stone she excavated was dragged outside to make a stockpile and to thicken the outside of the mine. Fortunately, there wasn't any signs of green and blue copper ore in the stone she excavated… mostly. The miners had followed a vein, and while there was more of the vein deeper in, right near the entrance of the mine they had extracted all that they could, leaving uneven wall supported by frames of wooden beams. The little patches of color she saw were too small and insignificant for her to expend the effort to try and separate it from the rest of the stone, so there was nothing to distract her from simply digging outward from the main shaft of the mine.

Riz and another two volunteers—she didn't know who they were beyond 'not Deil and Tackir'—stayed with her to protect her, guarding the entrance of the mine and the water wheel mechanism keeping the air circulating for her. She had been surprised it was still intact, and could only be smugly proud of the craftsmanship of her demesne's woodworkers as she claimed and bound the water in the trough to flow and turn the wheel once more.

While she had worked on the food storage, the inventory of the food storage was being conducted. The food was actually meticulously counted, both because they needed to know how much was there and to remove any doubt of a miscount. She heard the uproar as the results of the inventory came out and it was announced that people's homes would be inspected to search for the 'missing stores'. Lori wouldn't have literally heard it if she hadn't been coming out of the mine with a load of stone, which was seemingly being 'pushed' ahead of her with her staff so she could maintain direct control of the earthwisps causing it to flow and deform to move it across the ground. There had been angry shouts and assertions as to the supremacy of the sovereignty of a person's home, which was complete and utter nonsense.

She had lingered worriedly for a moment, hearing the distant, unintelligible voices of Shanalorre, Rian and—a quick check of her rock—Yllian speaking, and occasionally shouting to the crowd. Eventually, she had gone back to work, but only after ordering Riz to unleash violence on anyone suspicious who so much as approached the mine. Riz and two other people probably wouldn't be able to hold back an angry crowd long, but their dying screams would be her cue to bind the tunnel into a death trap as only a Whisperer could.

It didn't come to that, thankfully, even though she'd been wary as she worked for the rest of the day. She had heard the rest of what had transpired afterwards. Rian had offered to let anyone who could beat him or Yllian in a fist fight a pass on the inspection, and had even let them choose who they wanted to face. Most had chosen him.

Foolishly, it seemed.

"What were you thinking?-!" Lori had demanded once she had heard and managed to get Rian in front of her. "Offering to let people not be searched? By fist fighting you?"

"A lot of things," Rian said. "You weren't there—for which I was glad, because that meant you were safe—and you wouldn't have been able to recognize them by name or face if you had been, but nearly all those most against the search were known malcontents—"

"Yes Rian, that would have been blindingly obvious from context alone!"

"Uh, yes. So I figured I'm offer them an illusion of a chance to get away with what they'd done, all fair and in front of witnesses. If they win, they could get away with their theft." Rian's smiled gained an edge she'd never seen on him before. "Simple terms that everyone understood. We'd go to their house, and they could choose to let us in to look or fight me. If they won, we wouldn't inspect and move on to the next house. If I won, we go in." He shrugged. "When faced with the choice, most reasonable people chose to let us in, and we had random people in the crowd, as well as residents, come in to see that we only took the food and not anything else. Showed them we were being honest with our intentions. Those with only a little food we simply commended for having an emergency store to show were weren't being unreasonable."

"Most."

Rian shrugged. "Those that accepted were known malcontents, so them doing so wasn't unexpected. But it served to show that they were feeling guilty and had something to hide, especially when we did find food afterwards, and far more than they should have had."

"And you beat them. All of them."

Rian smiled widely. He hadn't lost any teeth, Lori noticed. "You're not the only one who's been feeling frustrated by selfish idiots," he said. "Yllian is older than I am, but also bigger, and everyone knows he used to be militia. I, however, am smaller and kind of scrawny looking." That… well, perhaps compared to Yllian. "So of course they chose to fight me instead."

"And you beat them."

"There's something about having an idiot who's making your life harder in front of you that lets you concentrate a lot of power into a punch to the face," Rian said. "And the gut. And the kidneys. And into the kicks to the side of their leg. Though Shana had to heal me up later. I'm good, but I'm not that good."

"I'm heard that you threw a man to the ground."

"He mostly threw himself down. I just helped. Enthusiastically."